FROM ARIZONA TO WISCONSIN

It was almost the end of May and time to migrate east. With the warm season approaching, following the Fellowship’s tradition, it was time to pack and leave Arizona to spend the summer in cooler Wisconsin. During the journey between the two Taliesins, a real road trip across the large North American country, the apprentices would split into small groups and plan the route in order to visit as many interesting places and architectural projects as possible, and then reunite in Wisconsin. The large convoy of the Taliesin Fellowship members was returning to the valley where it all began, following year after year the changing of the seasons in the nomadic spirit of its founder.

We started planning the trip.

In a small group of four apprentices, Todd, Bill and Eva, and myself, we decided to take turns driving a station wagon and a small truck across the vast territory of the United States, from the deserts of the Southwest to the plains of the Midwest, finally heading north and ending our trip at Taliesin. Shortly after arriving in Wisconsin, we would need to get back on the road again to reach Chicago in time for the inauguration of the great Wright exhibition scheduled for June 7th on the eve of the architect’s birthday. The plan included visiting afterward the splendid architecture of the “Windy City.” obtained from the glazed sections of a few recycled concrete pipes, echoing the astral geometry of a constellation. In front of the drafting room’s entry, Soleri had built the circular structure of the Ceramic Studio, under a decorated ribbed vault and a red skylight placed in the center of the complex recalling the sun.134

These first structures were built before the institution of the summer workshop programs and were followed by the North Apse with the Metal Studio used for the bronze bells, and the South Apse for the ceramic bells, both facing south. Additional structures were built later. The Cat-Cast House hosting the students, excavated with a Caterpillar supporting the roof with a series of recycled railway sleepers, and the Pool Canopy with a prefabricated reinforced concrete structure cast in place and hoisted upon a dozen of reused telephone poles. Moving along, I reached the Foundry Apse where the bronze bells were cast. Right in front of it the Pumpkin Apse looking like a large habitable pumpkin, and the Barrel Vaults, huge prefabricated recycled concrete pipes, cladded with glass and wood and converted into studios for the students. Right inside one of them I saw the panels and the brochures of the Minds for History symposiums and learned of the Cosanti Foundation’s cultural program, founded by Soleri in 1961, completing the workshops’ offer of ceramic and bronze windbells crafting courses. I finally walked to the Student Apse built by the pool, with the vaults decorated by the students and the huge plexiglass model of Arcosanti placed underneath. This was one of the last structures built at Cosanti together with the Antioch Building placed next to the Metal Studio. Walking back to the entrance I entered the breathtaking North Studio, used as a gallery and gift shop of the objects crafted at Cosanti, under the decorated vaults recalling the ribs of a prehistoric animal supported by concrete tilted columns.

There, at every successive visit, I compulsively purchased a large quantity of copper and ceramic windbells after having tested their tone, starting from the first one, the smallest I bought for my shelter at Taliesin West. Their tinkling was going to accompany my life since thereafter, traveling with me in the various parts of the world where I would live, warning me of the breath of a morning breeze or the arriving mistral, turning out to be a wonderful system to bring me back to the awareness of the present and the sacrality of every instant.

Soleri’s first activity on his return to Arizona was the handicraft production of windbells called Cosanti Originals, together with the design of textile

My readings and the collected testimonies confirmed that during Wright’s last years the presence of Olgivanna and the strong influence of Gurdjieff’s philosophy had increased in the Fellowship’s life. Already in the early ’50s, an annual festival of music and dance was organized, involving various apprentices in the preparation and execution of the movements of the Oriental sacred dances. They were based on the musical compositions of Olgivanna and the choreographies of her daughter Iovanna, returning from Gurdjieff’s Institute in Fontainebleau where she had gone to study. Among the different apprentices engaged in the festival’s activities had excelled the Egyptian Kamal Amin and the same Heloise, who besides participating as a dancer, had designed the costumes inspired by the original ones from the Gurdjieff's Institute. But there were other aspects of the Armenian mystic’s philosophy, embraced by Olgivanna, which had made the Fellowship’s life particularly problematic, especially after Wright’s death. The manipulatory control system on the apprentices’ lives and the limitations to their privacy was determining an almost total subjugation of the will, dangerously transforming the devotion to an alternative Fellowship’s ideal into a religious cult’s fanaticism. The studio work carried on under the guidance of the same Olgivanna and her son-in-law Wes Peters was becoming antagonistic to the various Fellowship’s activities, losing inspiration with the passing away of his main actor. The disbandment caused by Wright’s death had also led many of his best apprentices to abandon the Fellowship, leaving the survivors orphans of their most important interlocutor. Their blind devotion would constitute the main limit to the development of an original architecture following their master’s ideas, not being able to go beyond the imitation of his projects. Wright himself had indeed predicted its fate: Given the eclecticism of our educational system, imitation is still inevitable. People will take my ideas and my principles, will exploit them, or will give an academic formulation, to create a “style” where it is required; in fact, they are already creating it [...] at Taliesin, we put daily into practice the organic principles, in contact with life and nature. Nevertheless, we have a wing that goes too far to the right, and one too far to the left. The left-wing has taken the appearance of the things we love and, with the spirit of the painter, has drawn a superficial style from it; in other words, the left escapes from reality with the usual method of aestheticism, without understanding that buildings can be built scientifically, that science, art, and religion can find unity of expression. The right-wing sees the way we work and knows something of the tools but exaggerates both. Unfortunately, traditional education had produced young people only able to create by election and selection, not from the inside out of a creative impulse, by instinct guided by proven principles.160

Postscript

Palermo, March 30, 2021

Before going to press, right after the passing of John Rattenbury, who had contributed to establishing the firm Taliesin Associated Architects, I receive the news that the studio of H&S International, founded by my fellow apprentices Bing Hu and his wife WenChin Shi, has reached an agreement with the Foundation to move a branch of their office in the currently empty drafting rooms of Taliesin and Taliesin West. Bing Hu, who succeeded in the past months in the acquisition of the David Wright House in Phoenix, for a long time in the sights of speculators and at risk of demolition, was more recently engaged in rescuing the Taliesin school of architecture, relocating its headquarters and students in the campuses of Paolo Soleri at Cosanti and Arcosanti. From the Foundation’s official statement, H&S International is accepting applications for its summer “Learning by Doing” internship at Taliesin West.

Taliesin lives …